Rust is not a start, it's a next iteration over old ideas (look at Ada, Cyclone etc). All of those languages were niche and will stay niche for a reason.

> Garbage collection is just plain bad. I for one am glad we're finally ready to consider moving on.

We are not moving anywhere. You still need lifetime annotations in Rust and design your application in specific way to satisfy the borrow checker. You can't just write it the same way like you would in GC language. You trade productivity for complexity to avoid GC. Simplicity and productivity will always win in current market with complexity. Developers time is money, a lot more money than money spent on energy and hardware. That's why companies throw money at hardware and use GC languages, because it's a lot cheaper, simple and productive way to create software.

So unless you solved the halting problem GC is here to stay.